BUT... Melissa Harris-Perry Buries The Lead Story on National Wave of Public School Closings
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
When print or broadcast
news outlets grab a compelling story, only to distract attention away
from what the public needs to know, that's called “burying the lead.”
That's what Melissa Harris-Perry did in her Jan. 26 segment on whether
the nationwide wave of public school closings were “racist” or not.
Melissa Harris-Perry
devoted an eight minute segment of her January 26 MSNBC show to the
question of whether the current wave of public school closings,
indisputably concentrated in poor black and brown communities across the
nation, was racist. She had four panelists on the segment, only one of
whom seemed connected to and knowledgeable about the issue, a New York
City parent.
They batted the thing
around, and all pretty much agreed that it was a dirty shame, a tragic
waste closing hundreds of public schools in places like New York,
Chicago, Philadelphia, destructive to most ideas of community, and that
yeah, it probably was indeed racist. Harris-Perry called it an
“epidemic” of school closures. She noted that neighborhoods identify
especially with their high schools, and closing them violates the
integrity of communities.
Both Harris-Perry and the
NYC parent activist brought up the proliferation of high-stakes tests
which judged urban teachers and students as “failing” thus providing
some of the immediate justification for the school closings, though this
was something the discussion passed over rather than dwelled upon. The
NYC activist declared that she and the Save Our Schools Coalition
intended to be in DC during the coming week to press for recognition of
the fact that school closings were racist, ask for a meeting with the
president and for a national moratorium on school closures.
What Harris-Perry and her panelists failed to do was explain exactly ---- or even vaguely --- what's causing these racist school closures that are wrecking communities [4]. Labeling them “racist” describes only a single symptom of the “epidemic” while telling us nothing about its cause. The host and panelists didn't mention the Obama administration's signature Race To The Top Program even once. For a show whose Twitter handle is #nerdland, this is a pretty significant omission.
The fact is that high-stakes testing is being forced upon states and school districts [5]
by the Obama administration as part of its Race To The Top Program.
RTTT awards funding to states and school districts on the basis of four
criteria --- (1) school transformations and (2) school turnarounds, in
which large numbers of staff are fired and “run the school like a
business consultants brought in to tie teacher salaries tightly to test
scores, (3) school restarts in which public school facilities are handed
over to charter operators, and (4) school closings. RTTT guidelines
were written in the first place by consultants from the Eli Broad,
Walton Family, Gates, and other self-interested foundations which have
spent tens of millions promoting charter schools and educational
privatization.
Harris-Perry is far too intelligent not to know that Obama's Race To The Top policies are [6]deliberately, not accidentally driving the wave of school closings [6], or that President Obama is deep in the pocket of the charter school sugar daddies [7]. She
knows too that there are deep connections between the money spent on
the warfare state and bank bailouts and the money available to support
public education. And she's well aware that nobody's career has ever been harmed by supporting the policies of a sitting president, no matter how vile (or even racist) those policies might be.
The black political
class, based as it is on the fiction that it “represents” an
underprivileged minority defined by race, is perfectly willing to
entertain a shallow discussion of whether school closings are “racist.”
But explaining to her audience where the pressure for high stakes
testing, for school closures, for teacher firings, for turning public
schools into profitable low-cost holding tanks are coming from --- if it
means disagreeing with the First Black President, it ain't gonna
happen.
If corporate school
reform was something Republicans and Democrats disagreed on --- if
elected Republicans were doing it and elected Democrats were against it,
Melissa Harris-Perry might see fit to focus real intellectual wattage
on the subject, and truly inform her audience. She and her guests have
no trouble cackling at evil Republicans. But when the evil is
bipartisan, and a black Democrat in the White House, her career is more
important than the truth. She knows the microphone and the audience
ain't hers either, it's MSNBC's. If she doesn't tow the line, maybe
they'll give Michael Eric Dyson a show instead, he'll know how to stay
in his lane.
Like boxers instructed at
the beginning of every fight to “protect yourselves at all times”, MHP
knows her obligation is to protect the Democratic party elite, and the
president, and to protect millions of voters who supported Barack Obama
and his party from knowing what they really voted for. In this case that
meant drawing attention away from the charter school profiteers and
sugar daddies, and their intimate ties with this president, his
secretary of education, and a whole layer of Democratic and often black
politicians. So where the lead story on school closings should have on
what's causing the public school closings, who's pushing and profiting
from the public school closings, who is resisting those forces and how
we can stop school closings and protect public education, Melissa
Harris-Perry buried that lead. She just pronounced it all a hot racist
mess, and hosted a rambling and pointless discussion about an “epidemic”
without pointing to preventions, treatments or cures. What a waste.
Bruce
A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and a member of the
Georgia Green Party. He lives and works in Marietta GA, and can be
reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.
Links:
[1] http://blackagendareport.com/category/education-public-education/charter-schools
[2] http://blackagendareport.com/category/education-public-education/public-education
[3] http://blackagendareport.com/sites/www.blackagendareport.com/files/mhp_on_education.jpg
[4] https://secure.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-dixon/when-reforming-education_b_530799.html
[5] http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2009/08/comments-on-race-to-top-proposal.html
[6] http://blackagendareport.com/content/obamas-race-top-drives-nationwide-wave-school-closings-teacher-firings
[7] http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/obama-and-charter-school-sugar-daddies
[8] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fblackagendareport.com%2Fcontent%2Fmelissa-harris-perry-buries-lead-story-national-wave-public-school-closings&linkname=Melissa%20Harris-Perry%20Buries%20The%20Lead%20Story%20on%20National%20Wave%20of%20Public%20School%20Closings
---------------------------
